*About Slowness | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | September 18, 2026*
On Tuesday, my daughter’s class went outside to the park beside the school, and the teacher handed the children blank sheets of paper. The lawns at the schools here are vast and wide. After all, this is an island at the edge of Canada with very few people. She asked the children to find a spot to sit, each on their own. At the top of the page, they were to write: “Things I’m grateful for.” Then the teacher asked them to look around and make a list.
.
“I’m grateful for the grass,” my daughter wrote. I’m grateful for the sky. I’m grateful for the clouds. And so the first five minutes passed, and my daughter got up and handed the teacher the list she had made. “There’s still more time,” the teacher said, encouraging her to go back to her spot and keep writing. But I’m finished, my daughter said. The teacher asked her to go back anyway and try to continue.
.
I’m grateful for the wind, my daughter wrote. I’m grateful for my new sweater that keeps me warm in the wind. And for the birds. And for my room at home. Another ten minutes passed, and she went back to the teacher. This time, a smile and a slight shake of the head were enough to let my daughter know that there was still plenty of time left. And my daughter returned to her spot for the third time.
.
She had nothing more to write, so she simply sat there on the endless grass, her classmates scattered at a distance. At some point she lay down and pulled at blades of grass. Time stretched slowly, until her sense of time disappeared. Then the teacher’s voice broke the silence. Five minutes left. Just before my daughter handed in her page, she added one last sentence: I’m grateful for the quiet.
.
This story, which made me smile this week, is a good example of the “curriculum” at school. Ten days into the school year, the children still haven’t received a single textbook or workbook, no homework, no quizzes, no assessments. They’ve spent time in the library, gathered in different corners of the classroom, talked in groups. Or sat on the grass.
.
And yet, somehow, they’ve learned. Music, how to tell time, French. But not in the way we’re used to thinking about learning. And not at the pace we’re used to. It’s much the same in high school. A girl in my daughter’s class who came here from Germany asked the teacher when they were going to “really start learning,” and he told her, this is how we learn here. It isn’t going to get any faster than this.
.
It may sound enchanting and pastoral, but for my Israeli daughters it isn’t easy at all. They brought with them Israel’s feverish speed. Competitiveness. Quickness, and the spirit of the race to get good grades and finish on time and hand things in. All these years, in every grade and every setting, they were praised for their speed. It was considered an achievement.
.
But on our Canadian island, you have to shift down a gear. Maybe five gears. And it isn’t only at school. This week, for example, there was a fire drill. The alarm went off, and the children were asked to form a long line and walk out slowly and quietly. My daughter was astonished. She has lived through real alarms over the past three years. The children ran to the shelter as fast as they could. This week she stood in a quiet line, against every instinct her body had learned over the past few years.
.
And I have to shift down a gear here too. Luckily, I remember this from the last time we lived in Canada, and I’m trying to overcome my inner need to hurry. Two weeks ago I sent the principal an email. She’ll get back to me eventually. I have to resist the urge to send her reminders. And if the floor guy says he’ll be here soon, there’s no point cancelling plans. That “soon” can easily take a good few days. And on the road, when we see signs limiting the speed to 35km/h, we take our foot off the gas. Though it feels more like slowly gliding through the streets.
.
When we lived here before, this really shook me: how can speed be considered almost a virtue in one place, while in another it is genuinely troubling? And how does everything here work perfectly well without it?
.
It took a few years, but eventually I, too, did perfectly well. Inside that slowness, I discovered that I write poetry, and I recognized my own voice. I understood what I no longer wanted to keep doing, and I left academia. My relationships with my friends became much clearer. So did my relationship with my body. The food I eat. Inside the slowness, things came into focus, and in retrospect I can say that although shifting down a gear was incredibly annoying, it also changed my life from the ground up.
.
The person who would surely have been happiest about all this, had she been here, was my Grandma Rivka, who spent her whole life telling me: “Go slowly - that’s how you get there fastest.” I was an ambitious child, and that sentence annoyed me. I was good at being fast, and I was happiest when people told me, “Wow, how did you manage to get so much done?” But my grandmother also saw the price I was paying for my speed - the stress, and the fact that I never had time for anything. And she believed with all her heart that the way to go the farthest was, in fact, to slow down.
.
Like the fable of the tortoise and the hare. Which always annoyed me too, lol.
.
Anyway, this week my daughter sat on the grass, and that was the assignment her teacher had given her: to take her time and pay attention to things. And now I’m thinking about those two expressions we use so often. How beautiful it is to “take your time” - when usually time is the one that takes you, rushing past, leaving you without a moment to spare. Slowness makes that reversal possible: to take the reins of time into your own hands.
.
And then there is the expression “pay attention.” In Hebrew, the expression is lasim lev, literally, “to place the heart.” Just like time, our attention can seem like a creature with a will of its own, something we have no control over - whom and what we will love, what we will happily focus on. The possibility of taking hold of the reins of the heart and choosing where to direct them probably exists only when you “take your time.” When no deadline takes your time for you. No rapid race of tasks. And these expressions are so commonplace in our language, yet I had never taken the time to pay attention to them.
.
So to close, I want to dedicate to all of us a poem by the Polish poet Anna Kamieńska. How beautifully she writes about whole parts of childhood and life that were lost to time because of speed, and about what happens when we pay attention:
*Anna Kamieńska / Attention*
[Translated into English from Rivka Gurfine-Uchmani’s Hebrew translation ]
I was so intent on making sure
I wouldn’t miss anything
and I didn’t notice
my childhood
or my youth
or my life
I’m glad that at least today
I noticed an old woman in the street
I turned my head to look after her
she moved step by step
a bundle of silvery light in her hand
perhaps this will be the only thing
I remember from my entire life.
.
.
May we enter this Yom Kippur slowly and quietly, and may we take our time and pay attention throughout the year ahead. And may we all be sealed for a good year,
*Maya Tevet Dayan*
.